Plato

(428-348 B.C.E.)

 

There is a natural progression from Plato’s theory of Forms to his philosophy of ethics. If one can be deceived by appearances in the physical world, one can be equally deceived by appearances in the moral realm. The kind of knowledge that helps one to distinguish between shadows, reflections, and real objects in the visible world is just the kind of knowledge that we need to discriminate between the shadows and reflections of the genuinely good life. Plato believed that just as there could be no science of physics if our knowledge were limited to visible things, so also there could be no knowledge of a universal Idea of Good if we were limited to the experiences we have of particular cultures. The well-known skepticism of the Sophists illustrated to both Socrates and Plato this connection between knowledge and morality. For the Sophists, believing that all knowledge is relative, denied that people discover any stable and universal moral standards. Their skepticism led the Sophists to some inevitable conclusions regarding morality, namely (1) that moral rules are fashioned deliberately by each community and have relevance and authority only for the people in that place; (2) that moral rules are unnatural, that people obey them only because of the pressure of public opinion, and that if their acts could be done in private, even the "good" among us would not follow the rules of morality; (3) that the essence of justice is power, or that "might is right"; and (4) that in answer to the basic question "what is the good life?" one would have to say that it is the life of pleasure. Against the formidable teaching of the Sophists, Plato brought fourth the Socratic notion that "knowledge id virtue" and supplied it with a philosophical elaboration the chief ingredients of which were (1) the concept of the soul and (2) the theory of virtue as function.

The Idea of the Soul

In the Republic, Plato describes the soul as having three parts, which he calls reason, spirit, and appetite. He derived this tripartite conception of the soul from the common experience of internal confusion and conflict that all humans share. When he analyzed the nature of this conflict, he discovered that there are three different kinds of activity going on in a person. First, there is an awareness of a goal or a value, and this is the act of reason. Second, there is the drive toward action, the spirit, which is neutral at first but responds to the direction of reason. Third, there is the desire for the things of the body, the appetites. What made him ascribe these activities ties to the soul was his assumption that the soul is the principle of life and movement. The body by itself is inanimate, and, therefore, when it acts or moves, it must be moved by the principle of life, the soul. That the soul has three parts followed, Plato thought, from the fact that people’s internal conflict indicated different springs of action at work. The reason could suggest a goal for behavior only to be overcome by sensual appetite, and the power to the spirit could be pulled in either direction by these sensual desires. Plato illustrated this human condition by his striking figures in the Phaedrus, where he portrays the charioteer driving two horses. One horse, says, Plato, is good, "needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only." The other is bad, "the mate of insolence and pride … hardly yielding to whip and spur." Though the charioteer has a clear vision of where to go and the good horse is on course, the bad horse, "plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and charioteer …"

The charioteer, by being the one who holds the reins, has the duty, the right, and the function to guide and control the horses. In the same way, the rational part of the soul has the right to rule the spirited and the appetitive parts. The charioteer cannot get anywhere without the two horses, and for this reason these three are linked together and must work together to achieve their goals. The rational part of the soul has this same sort of relation to its other parts, for the powers of appetite and spirit are indispensable to life itself. Reason works with and upon spirit and appetite, and these two also move and affect the reason. But the relation of reason to spirit and appetite is determined by what reason is: a goal-seeking and measuring faculty. The passions also engage in goal seeking, for they constantly seek the goal of pleasure. Pleasure is a legitimate goal of life, but the passions, being simply drives toward the things that give pleasure, are incapable of distinguishing between objects that provide higher or longer-lasting pleasure and those that only appear to provide these pleasures.

The peculiar function of the rational part of the soul is to seek the true goal of human life, and it does this by evaluating things according to their true nature. Although the passions or appetites might lead us into a world of fantasy and deceive us into believing that certain kinds of pleasures will bring us happiness, it is the unique role of reason to penetrate the world of fantasy, to discover the true world and thereby direct the passions to objects of love that are capable of producing true pleasure and true happiness. Unhappiness and the general disorder of the human soul are the result of man’s confusing appearances with reality. This confusion occurs chiefly/when the passions override the reason. This is why Plato argued, as Socrates had before him, that moral evil is the result of ignorance. Just as there can be order between the charioteer and the horses only if the charioteer is in constant control, so also with the human soul—it can achieve order and peace only if the rational part is in control of the spirit and appetites. Throughout his account of the moral experience of human beings, Plato alternates between an optimistic view of their capacity for virtue and a rather negative opinion about whether they will fulfill their potentiality for virtue. This double attitude rests upon Plato’s theory of moral evil. Plato said that evil or vice is caused by ignorance, by false knowledge. False knowledge occurs when the passions influence the reason to think that what appears to bring happiness will do so, although in reality it cannot. When the appetites overcome the reason, the unity of the soul is adversely affected. While there is still a unity, this new unity of the soul is inverted, since now the reason is subordinated to the appetites and has thereby lost its rightful place. What makes it possible for this disordered unity to occur, or what makes false knowledge possible? In short, what is the cause of moral evil?

The Cause of Evil: Ignorance or Forgetfulness

The cause of evil is discovered in the very nature of the soul and in the relation of the soul to the body. Before it enters the body, says Plato, the soul has prior existence. As we have seen, the soul has two main parts, the rational and the irrational. This irrational part in turn is made up of two sections, the spirit and the appetites. Each of the two original parts has a different origin. The rational part of the soul is created by the Demiurge out of the same receptacle as the World Soul, whereas the irrational part is created by the celestial gods, who also form the body. Thus, even before it enters the body, the soul is composed of two different kinds of ingredients. In the soul’s prior existence, the rational part has a clear vision of the Forms, of truth, though at the same time, the spirit and appetites already, by their very nature, have a tendency to descend. If one asks why it is that the soul descends into a body, Plato says that it is simply the tendency of the irrational part, the part of the soul that is not perfect, to be unruly and to pull the soul toward the earth. For Plato says that "when perfect and fully winged she (the soul) soars upward … whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground - there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame … and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creation." The soul "falls," and that is how it comes to be in a body. But the point is that the soul has an unruly and evil nature in its irrational parts even before it enters the body, so that in one sense the cause of evil is present even in the soul’s preexistent state. It is in "heaven" that the soul alternates between seeing the Forms or the truth and "forgetting" this vision, whereupon its decline sets in. The soul has the inherent possibility of disorder, so that when in fact disorder does occur in the soul, the cause of evil is to be located within the soul itself, being ignorance and forgetfulness of the vision of reality. Evil, in this view, is not a positive thing but is rather a characteristic of the soul wherein the soul is "capable" of forgetfulness, and it is those souls only that do forget the truth that in turn descends, being dragged down by the attraction for earthly things. The soul, then, is perfect in nature, but one aspect of its nature is this possibility to laps into disorder, for the soul also contains the principle of imperfection as do other parts of creation. Upon its entrance into the body, however, the difficulties of the soul are greatly increased.

Plato believed that the body stimulated the irrational part of the soul to overcome the rulership of reason. The soul’s entrance into the body, therefore, is a further cause of disorder or the breakdown of the harmony between the various parts of the soul. For one thing, when the soul leaves the realm of the forms and enters the body, it moves from the realm of the One to the realm of the many. Now the soul is adrift in the bewildering sea of the multiplicity of things and subject to all sorts of errors because of the deceptive nature of these things. In addition, the body stimulates such activities in the irrational part of the soul as the indiscriminate search for pleasure, exaggerating such appetites as hunger, thirst, and the desire to create offspring, which in turn can become lust. In the body the soul experiences sensation, desire, pleasure, and pain as well as fear and anger. There is love, too, for a wide range of objects varying from the simplest morsel that can satisfy some taste to a love of truth or beauty that is pure and eternal. All this suggest that the body acts as a sluggish encumbrance to the soul, that the spirit and appetites of the soul are peculiarly susceptible to the workings of the body. In this way, then, the body disturbs the harmony of the soul, for the body exposes the soul to stimuli that deflect the reason from true knowledge or that prevent the reason from recalling the truth it once knew.

In the world of people, error is perpetuated whenever a society has the wrong values, causing individuals to accept as their own these wrong values. Every society inevitably acts as a teacher of its members, and for this reason its values will become the values of individuals. Moreover, societies tend to perpetuate the evils and errors committed by earlier generations. Plato understood this notion by suggesting that in addition to such a social transmission of evil, human souls would reappear via a transmigration, bringing into a new body their earlier errors and judgments of value, It is the body, in the last analysis, that accounts for ignorance, rashness, and lust, for the body disturbs that clear working of the reason, spirit, and appetites by exposing the soul to a cascade/ of sensations.

Looking back upon Plato’s account of the human moral condition, we have seen that he begins with a conception of the soul as existing first of all independently of the body. In this state, the soul enjoys a basic harmony between its rational and irrational parts, a harmony wherein the reason controls the spirit and appetites through its knowledge of the truth. But since the irrational part of the soul has the possibility of imperfection, it expresses this possibility by being attracted through its appetites to the lower regions, dragging with it the spirit and reason. Upon entering the body, the original harmony of the parts of the soul is further disrupted, former knowledge is forgotten, and the inertia of the body obstructs the recovery of this knowledge.

Recovering Lost Morality

For Plato, morality consists in the recovery of one’s lost inner harmony. It means reversing the process by which the reason has been overcome by the appetites and the stimuli of the body. The reason must regain its control over the irrational parts of the self. Only knowledge can produce virtue because it is ignorance or false knowledge that has produced evil. People always think that whatever they do will in some way give them pleasure and happiness. No one, says Plato, ever knowingly chooses an act that will be harmful to oneself. One may do "wrong" acts such as murder or lying, and even admit the wrongness of these and other acts, but one always assumes that some benefit will come from them. This is false knowledge, a kind of ignorance, which people must overcome in order to be moral. To say, then, that "knowledge is virtue" means that false knowledge must be replaced with an accurate appraisal of things or acts and their vision.

Before one can go from false to true knowledge, one must somehow become aware that one is in a state of ignorance. It is as if one must be awakened from a "sleep of ignorance." One can be awakened by something that is happening within one or by something external to one by someone else. Similarly, with regard to knowledge and particularly moral knowledge, human awakening works in these two ways. Assuming, as Plato does, that knowledge is lodged deeply in the mind’s memory, this latent knowledge wick from time to time come to the surface of consciousness. What the soul once knew is raised to present awareness by the process of recollection. Recollection begins first of all when the mind experiences difficulties with the seeming contradictions of sense experience. As one tries to make sense out of the multiplicity of things, one begins to go "beyond" the things themselves to ideas, and this action of the mind is set in motion by one’s experience of a problem that needs to be solved. Besides this internal source of awakening, there is Plato’s notion of the external agent. In his allegory of the Cave, Plato depicts how men moved from darkness to the light, from ignorance to knowledge. But in this allegory he portrays the mood of self-satisfaction among the prisoners; they do not know that they are prisoners, that they are chained by false knowledge and dwell in the darkness of ignorance. Their awakening must come through some external agent. As Plato says, "their release from the chains and the healing of their unwisdom" is brought about by their being "forced suddenly to stand up, turn … and walk with eyes lifted to the light." That is, someone must break off the prisoner’s chains and turn him around. Then, having been forcibly released, he can be led step by step out of the cave.

Socrates, with the power of his irony and the persistence of his dialectic method, was one of history’s most effective awakeners of people from their sleep of ignorance.